Hope Is a Choice

[Tesla_WTC_Solution]

The Choice to Have Hope

I wanted to talk about something for once that has less to do with the material aspect of stuff, and focus on the spiritual (something I severely neglect)...

Lately (this week) I've noticed (and so have you!) an upswing in the number of health-crisis-related threads on Avalon! Particularly cancer. Now, for these people, the normal incoherent mumbo jumbo that some of us indulge in here has started to pale. They are surrounded not by figments and maybes but the cold certainty of death and hardship leading to death.

What can we do to help? Those of us who remain blessedly above the harsh undertow of Nature and decay, thanks to modern medicine and easy life. We forget that humanity is a family, and abandoning even the basest emotions like despair and guilt, we travel through life as if we are not connected or involved with these suffering people. We suffer through apathy and depression because our lives lack action and will.

Now, perhaps I am generalizing too much. I shouldn't lump all of you (or us) into one large uncaring crowd of emotionless people. But we have to admit to each other, modern life seems rather dull. Where is the Panacea, where is the promise of a brighter future?

We have to make that future for ourselves. And there, you see, is how we come to hope. Someone ill once told me, during a moment of clarity, that the most precious thing we have here on earth is time. How we spend our time matters. Perhaps nothing else matters more. I remind you of the example of Benjamin Franklin and Erasmus -- men who knew what was important to them and worked to define these things. Ben Franklin was relentlessly organized, which was the source of his greatness in many ways, and Erasmus shunned much of the popular materialism of his age in order to become a better scholar, and improve himself.

I've seen a lot of self-taught people here. Some of them have more patience than others. But we have to acknowledge that those people have a lot of drive, and that could be what separates the intelligent from the sleepers, the Haves from the Have Nots of the world.

But I ask you, have all these researches and lessons brought you any happiness? Do you feel more or less secure in yourself because of them? Have you replaced your hopes and dreams with a lot of cold hard facts and lists of grievances?

If this post has a point, or a moral, Heaven forbid, I think it's this: leave room for Hope in your lives. Give hope to others by lending that helping hand. Maybe even learn to bite your tongue when you perceive stupidity in the world. Because we are all learning, and our common hope is that we reach that Panacea, that balm of Gilead, that place of unity and understanding in which suffering and pain might be nothing more than a bad memory, or at best, a hard lesson.

There is a book in my house, a comic book. In this book, there is a battle. It is a battle of wills between the King of Dreams and a demon of Hell. There they play the oldest game, a contest of creativity and expression in which the victory lies in finding the final answer, the final solution to the ruthless cycle of violence and destruction in the universe. Unassailable, undiluted, Hope is the fortress that harbors and nourishes the human soul.

So wherever you are, whatever you believe, whether you are in hardship or in a time of plenty, remember to Hope.

You can never go wrong for very long if your life is guided by this one principle.

I hope I can learn it too.

[ghostrider]

Just throwing my two cents in , let hope open the realm of possibility ... once the mind is open to possibility , there is no stopping it ...you are so right, anyone with hope , no matter what comes their way, they can overcome it because of the idea of hope ... in the words of morpheus, don't think you are , KNOW you are...